Western Digital Shows New PCIe Enterprise SSD at IDF

Today while we were walking around IDF 2013, we discovered something that caught our eye and didn’t quite make sense. Western Digital’s own enterprise PCIe Gen 3 SSD. This SSD is a product of Western Digital, the parent company of HGST and WD. Keep in mind that this is an enterprise class drive, which means that it will not be had for a very small amount, but by the looks of it Western Digital is not playing around. At first glance, we noticed that this drive is actually actively cooled.

Upon further inspection, you can see that the drive is running both active and passive cooling, one for the PCIe Gen3 controller and one for the SDD controller itself. From what it looks like, the PCIe Gen 3 controller is the one that is actively cooled and the SSD controller is passively cooled. When we asked Western Digital’s representatives about the drive’s controller we were stone walled and told that they would not be making that announcement on this unannounced drive.

What we did discover, however, was that this drive is a 700GB drive using Micron NAND and is capable of some impressive mixed IOPS. As you can tell in the image below, running a mixed workload in IOMeter, the SSD is capable of about 250,000 IOPS and hopefully we’ll see some more information about this drive’s performance shortly.

Also, the drive is carrying the name WDC3500BKM which probably means that it will be called the 3500 since it isnt a 3.5 TB drive. A quick google search yields no results, so it looks like we’re the first in the world to carry this story. An exclusive for you, our readers.